Beautiful women of a certain age run the risk of being called "well-preserved." Well-preserved! Can you think of a more atrocious form of praise? Like any woman whose wrinkles have formed in all the right places, or whose face has been chemically smoothed and surgically ironed straight, is some sort of Damien Hirst installation, soaked in formaldehyde. An aging document that has been carefully stored in a climate-controlled, low-humidity, museum-quality environment, protected from the elements and all the dangers of living. A precious object that has somehow survived the centuries without entirely falling apart.
When I'm pushing sixty, seventy - heck, eighty - I don't want anybody looking at me with the clinical eyes of a taxidermist, checking to see if all the seams line up and the cracks aren't showing too clearly. I don't want them to dare think the words "well-preserved." No, I want them to admire the sharp wit hiding in the creases of my eyelids and think to themselves that all the doe-eyed ingenues of the world couldn't compete. I want young men to tuck their attraction to me away where they keep all their dark secrets; I want them not to understand it. I don't want anybody to whisper that I'm "remarkably..." anything "for my age." I want them to think it to themselves in astonishment, ashamed at their surprise, silent in their admiration. I want to be all glory, nothing faded about it. I want to make people doubt whether they are in the prime of their years after all. I want to have nothing whatsoever in common with an old jar of jam or a salted piece of meat.
I was trying to read the NYT's review of Mary Gordon's new novel and couldn't make it past the second paragraph. Words, man. Sometimes they're like landmines that blow up in my face and throw me terribly off track. A handful of letters and a hyphen and boom...
